The need for effective waterway planning and management continues to grow in the face of changing manmade and natural challenges. For instance, natural water flows are routinely dammed, redirected, caused to take on increased flow or otherwise altered by urban expansion. Absent corrective measures, such changes to existing river conditions can lead to flooding, fragmentation, nutrient disruption, erosion and other potentially destructive situations for dwellings and natural habitats. Professionals must consequently anticipate such changes and make physical adjustments to the channel width, banks, route, depth or other features of a stream or river to accommodate the new river conditions.
To this end, river professionals have developed formulas and spreadsheet applications for assessing and monitoring existing streams and rivers. Stored data pertaining to existing waterways can be useful in designing optimal dimensions for a disturbed (impacted) reach, or target stretch of water. Such data conventionally includes data collected on a river or stream within the boundaries defined by approximately 20-30 bankfull widths along the thalweg and the breadth of the floodprone area. A thalweg comprises a line connecting the deepest points along a channel, and bankfull generally regards a stream discharge value at a point where the river just fills the banks of a stream channel. Such design practices are generally categorized under a group of river restoration processes called Natural Channel Design.
Natural Channel Design incorporates naturally occurring stream processes during a restoration project to an extent that will allow the stream, itself, to stabilize and provide maximal biological potential. To this end, Natural Channel Design incorporates fluvial geomorphology as the basis for stream stabilization. Aspects of fluvial geomorphology include the interactions of climate, geology, topography, vegetation and land use within a given watershed. Natural Channel Design also makes allowances for the fact that rivers and streams support both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. The goal of Natural Channel Design is to provide a healthy habitat for aquatic organisms such as fish, amphibians, insects, mollusks and plants, while stabilizing the stream networks that provide food sources and migration routes for mammals and birds. That is, using undisturbed properly functioning sections of streams, or reference reaches as models promotes restoration solutions for stream channels that provide both physical stability and biological potential.
Despite the advancements to design processes realized by Natural Channel Design formulas and the electronic storage of existing river statistics, river design remains an arduous task. For example, accounting for all of the above listed geomorphological variables during the restoration of a stream presents a major challenge to Natural Channel Design. Namely, a conventional designer must accomplish the substantial task of retrieving the stored river data from numerous, decentralized sources in the course of a channel design process. Even where all of such data is accessible to the designer, it may take hours to amass the data required to finish the design.
In a specific example, a user attempting to accomplish a design for an impact reach must manually measure reach data, such as the cross-sectional dimensions of a stretch of the impact reach. The user then records the reach data in a log book, the entries of which the user will later apply in formulas in order to arrive at a design feature. Often, the formulas require additional data from multiple reference books and/or government databases, such as reference reach data or regional curves. The formulas, themselves, must be routinely looked up in another book or other source before the user can begin to manually enter numbers into a calculator to solve the requisite equations. In any case, convention design processes burden professionals with locating and updating data from numerous different sources.
While conventional spreadsheets and databases can help with the efficiency of certain aspects of a design process, such as copying data, conventional tools still require a user to manually calculate and visualize aspects of a channel design. Such tedious practices associated with manually evaluating large amounts of data and program results can slow and otherwise complicate design processes. Furthermore, the decentralized sources, results and incompatible formats of compiled data and tools used in conventional design processes can frustrate comprehensive analysis of channel design. As such, an abundance of available data and calculations can ironically overwhelm a planner, contribute to inefficiency and ultimately lead to an inferior design.
Consequently, and for in part the above delineated reasons, there exists a need for an improved manner of analyzing, designing and otherwise managing river features.